


A Decaying Border

by slipknot



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012), The Avengers - All Fandoms
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-09-13
Updated: 2012-09-23
Packaged: 2017-11-14 03:23:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/510794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slipknot/pseuds/slipknot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somewhere out there, beyond a thin line of atoms, is a duplicate Earth – an infinite number of Earths, if one believed the theory. The problem rests in the fact that the border between <i>this</i> reality and their neighbors has been broken, breached, and is therefore crumbling. The universe ends in 839 days. This is not hyperbole.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, this is AU. I basically adopted the idea of Alternate Realities from Fringe, and adapted that to the Avenger's verse, but you don't need to be familiar with Fringe at all. I plan on bringing in basically every single character in the verse, and this fic could very well turn novel-length. I hope you like, and uh, if you see any errors, please point 'em out.

* * *

 

It starts with small, misplaced items. The cabin isn’t ransacked, but she hasn’t yet ruled out burglary because out of the corner of her eye, she sees a jostled painting and a broken pitcher lying in shards across her hardwood floor. It’s the first clue, but certainly not the last. There’s already a wisp of a red dawn rising, and winter in Minnesota is always one step shy of a frozen hell. The place should be frosty rather than warm, but someone has turned on the heater and there’s a dim light flickering from the fireplace in the living room. Such obvious signs tell Natasha that whoever is here doesn’t care whether she knows or not. 

 _Someone’s arrogant,_ she thinks.

Natasha steps inside. She’s smartly dressed, her clothes neatly pressed, her hair and makeup meticulous, wearing a thick coat and snug gloves, a scarf wrapped around her neck. She unwinds the scarf as she moves. She’s systematic but slow: the foyer first, edging around the table stacked with newspapers and loose-leafed papers, and emerges from the hallway to her kitchen. She bought freshly ground coffee earlier that day, and the package now rests open.

It’s a familiar voice as soon as she hears it, amused and teasing, “Could have had you three times by now, Romanov.”

“In your dreams, Barton,” she returns easily, pivoting on her heels.

“Frequently,” he muses, almost wry.

Clint stands half-obscured in shadows, but the blurry silhouette shatters when he stumbles forward a little. Natasha sees the bloodstain on his shirt a moment before she catches him. Her fingers snag on the ridges of his ballistic vest sewn across the breastplate. It’s hard and cold, and she helps carry him forward to a chair where he collapses inelegantly. There are angry bruises all over him, the type that’ll leave his face as colorful as a Van Gogh painting come morning. Obediently, knowing what’s coming, he stays mostly still as she runs a quick inspection over his body and confirms relatively minor injuries. The worst is a small cut at his side, between Velcro strips of his vest. It looks like a serrated knife wound, six inches long and at least an inch deep. It missed anything vital, though.

“You’re going to need stitches,” she remarks, not even bothering to ask how he got so messy. Either he’ll tell her, or he won’t. “Why didn’t you head back to base? Or a hospital? Christ, Clint, that knife wound looks like it’s been bleeding for hours.”

“Your place was close,” he says, and she highly doubts that.

Her cabin is in the middle of nowhere, not even on most maps, and with anyone else, she’d demand how they knew where to find her before offering any assistance. As it is, she retreats to her bathroom, where she finds his empty quiver and the sink filled with bloodied arrows. There’s also soiled towels along the lip of the tub. Clint must have tried in vain to clean himself up a little before she arrived. There’s blood tracked all over the counter, the faucet, and slow drips have fallen down in messy lines to pool on the tiled floor. The sight makes Nat freeze for a beat, casting a look back over her shoulder in concern. Maybe she’s wrong about the significance of the injury, or maybe he’s hiding another wound? A moment after the thought arises, she discards it. He isn’t stupid enough to downplay injuries, and Natasha can recognize a troubling wound from a dozen paces out. Her triage skills are more honed than most physicians. 

She retrieves her med kit from the cabinet and quietly goes back to fix him up. He lets her work in silence, likely too exhausted to trade the normal banter with her, but when she looks up, his gaze is fixed on her and she knows instinctively that it hasn’t moved since the moment she walked in through those doors.

Sixteen months since they’ve seen each other. 

It feels longer to Natasha.

“Aren’t you going to ask what happened?” he asks.

She smiles at him, indulgent. “What happened?”

“Three more recruits dead tonight,” he tells her. “The Shade captured a dozen more yesterday. We’re losing this fight.”

She closes her eyes, and looks away. “We were always going to lose this fight. It’s just happening faster than most expected.”

He lets the comment slide without response. It isn’t the first time she’s had this argument with him. She’s smarter than to hope it’ll be near the last. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s power, though in clear descent, still has a few straggling threads of influence here and there, and Clint’s always been a believer in the cause, a strong recruit. Nat has never shared the enthusiasm, though she was in these programs long before Clint and likely, given his propensity for volunteering for the messiest assignments, going to outlast him. But that’s their world for you: it took in willing and capable men and women and turned them into devotees. She’d been born with the privilege of being a recruit, but whatever Fury was up to these days, Natasha wants no part of it anymore. 

Resentment isn’t the right word, because she’s too stubbornly loyal, even now, even after everything, to ever use that term – recruits are _always_ loyal – but she’s done fighting battles. She just wants to be left alone. Most people would take the fact that she’s flown halfway across the country to a cabin in the middle of nowhere as a heavy clue. 

But then again, Clint isn’t most people.

“We need your help,” he says. “Fury could use your powers, and Tony—”

She rolls her eyes as she rises. “Tony doesn’t need anyone except Pepper.”

“Pepper’s recruiting in Europe, and the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D. is spread thin across the globe. Jane is in Iceland—”

“Iceland?” Natasha said, incredulous. “What’s Jane doing there? There’s no recruits there.”

“Making another machine that destroys the laws of physics, likely. How the hell should I know? You know I’ve never been able to follow that scientific crap worth a damn. She’s working on another wormhole, last I checked.”

She doesn’t comment. S.H.I.E.L.D. has a lot of brilliant scientists on board, still trying to save the world. From the infamous Tony Stark, _Destroyer of Worlds_ , to Jane Foster, _the Healer_ , to Bruce Banner and Betty Ross and a dozen of the smartest men and women in all of mankind. It isn’t enough. The world is fracturing. It’s only a matter of time before the walls of this reality cave in and everything will be for nothing. 

“We can still win this,” Clint says, almost imploring her to believe. “We can still save everything.”

She knows better. It’s a harsh reality to face, but Natasha has always dealt better with harsh reality than most. Amazing, isn’t it? How one decaying border between two universes could fuck shit up this badly. _Alternate Universes_. Christ, at least the Cold War had been a war with a winner at the end. Here, there are only losers all around.

“How many recruits are there now?” she asks, curious despite herself.

Clint flinches. “Half what we need to fix the breach.”

She bites back a curse and shakes her head, looking away. She’s never known what to think of the idea that somewhere out there, beyond a thin line of atoms, is a duplicate Earth – an infinite number of Earths, if one believed the theory. The problem rests in the fact that the border between  _this_  reality and their neighbors has been broken, breached, and is therefore crumbling. The end result: they’re looking at the Big Bang theory, except in reverse. When the idea first broke of the impending disaster, some had foolishly called it the Big Crunch, after the famous physical cosmological theory, but Natasha understands enough to know that was never quite right. The Big Crunch theory rests on a slow decay, one possible scenario for the ultimate fate of the universe in which the metric expansion of space eventually reverses on itself and the universe re-collapses, ending as a black hole singularity. The new theory, the one Bruce likes to call, tongue-in-cheek,  _the Big Combustion,_  outlines for everyone in-the-know that the final judgment day is only two and a half years off. She won’t even be thirty when the universe ends.

The only line of defense against the impending disaster is what Fury calls "recruits," a group of special individuals capable of supernatural feats. Telekinesis, telepathy, mind-control, and apparently, if the theory holds any water, the ability to collectively fix a hole in the universe.

Natasha has her doubts.

 

* * *

“You ever think about it?” Clint asks her, later that night. “What our doubles are like, in that alternate universe?”

Natasha shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Foster has a theory,” Clint continues anyway. “That physics and the fundamental aspects of reality run differently there. They’re not like us. They don’t have telekinesis. They don’t have people with the ability to push. They aren’t any recruits.”

She thinks about that for a moment. No S.H.I.E.L.D. to tell her what to do. No recruits to find. No big bad Shade to fear. She wouldn’t have to lie about herself or her capabilities. She wouldn’t have to use alias after alias to move across a world that would probably, as a collective, despise her very existence if they had any inkling of what she could do. Her childhood would have been normal, her mental powers likely untapped. It’d just be a world full of ordinary citizens and blithe mundane life, likely.

“Sounds boring,” Natasha remarks, idly.

“Sounds like heaven,” Clint argues.

They agree to disagree, like always.

 

* * *

She wakes the next day to the sound of her shower running. Natasha turns over and groans, never one for a morning person – before she glances aside at the alarm clock and the digital red numbers tell her it’s already passed ten. She blinks, blurry-eyed, and forces herself out of bed. She pads barefoot into the kitchen to find a freshly brewed coffee in the pot, which puts a point in Clint’s favor, but he’s also taking a shower when she desperately needs to use the bathroom facilities, which snatches the point away again. She has no choice but to clip her hair up into a messy ponytail and call it the closest thing to proper grooming she can manage until Clint gets out. 

Clint left a mess on her sofa, untidy sheets and a woolen blanket still strewn over where he slept. She gathers the blankets and folds them neatly, setting them aside, and tosses his soiled bandages into a bag for Clint to throw away later. He’s crashing at her place; the least he can do was take out the trash. The cabin isn’t much to look at, but she enjoys the space, the quiet solitude, and most importantly that it’s a full thirty-five minute drive away from the nearest town. Despite the S.H.I.E.L.D.’s declining resources, Natasha has enough skills to market out. She’s never had to worry about money, or roommates, and she isn’t a particularly social person either – there are a few people that know she lives up here, locals that like to share drinks with her on the weekends when she drives to town, but they’ve never been to her cabin and they never will. Clint is her first visitor in all the months she’s been living here. If you can call a guy that picks her lock in the middle of the night a _visitor_. 

Natasha sends the next twenty minutes sipping her coffee while watching the morning news. Cathy Spears, the blue-eyed, bottle-blonde morning broadcaster, is as insufferably cheery today as she is every other day. The cute-byplay between her and her co-anchor is always too sugary for Natasha to enjoy, but she turns the volume up when Cathy begins discussing something of interest.  _“Last night’s closure of major interstate highway 35 was due to a massive motorcycle chase and shootout with an unknown suspect. The events led to the death of three armed civilians and the injury of two police officers. The main suspect is reported to have driven a motorcycle through three different roadblocks and led the police on a seventeen-mile pursuit before disappearing into the wilderness near in Chippewa National Forest. The suspect was described as a white male, age 30 to 40, wearing a dark crew-neck t-shirt, motorcycle jacket, and dark denim jeans. The suspect is believed to be armed and dangerous.”_

“Clint,” she calls out. “You’re on TV!”

She hears the shower turn off, but before Clint can answer, the news has already moved onto the splashy remarks of some Congressman. It’s an election year, so every night is a fundraising event for politicians. Being invested and interested in politics is an unavoidable hazard to anyone’s health, but Natasha finds it amusing more than anything else because it’s not like any of it matters. She envies the masses, though. For their blissful ignorance to the apocalypse headed their way, and the fact that they can believe in the naiveté of one regime or another. It’s all more of the same bullshit in a pretty new dress, as far as she's concerned. 

Natasha switches off the TV and turns, finding Clint emerging from the bathroom in a towel. “What did you say?” he calls out, dripping wet.

Natasha doesn’t visibly falter, but it’s a damn near thing. It isn’t like she hasn’t seen him naked before – they’ve known each other for well over two decades, and from foxholes to hospitals to sharing body warmth, they’ve done everything from sleeping together platonically to fucking like bunnies in the aftermath of calamity. Natasha doesn’t like to mix emotions with sex, however, which is why she had to end the trend a few years back when she realized she wanted Clint to be a guy that stuck around. 

Still, sometimes she wonders about the wisdom of her _no-fucking-Clint_ rule.

“You were on the news,” she informs, forever the consummate actress. Her eyes betray nothing but casual disinterest as she hands him some clothes she took out from the back of her closet. “You should have told me you were involved in a police chase last night.”

“You didn’t ask for details,” Clint returns. He takes the offered clothes, and holds it up suspiciously. “Do I want to know why you have men’s clothing?”

“I’m in Minnesota, Clint. I’m not dead.”

The implications of men sleeping over sinks in, because she isn’t a prude and she isn’t ashamed of healthy needs – but she isn’t imagining it either when Clint’s stoic expression falters as he turns away. Natasha watches him walk away, and dismisses the awkward moment as Clint’s understandable dislike of wearing any other man’s clothing. It’s partially pretext, and she knows it. Physical attraction is one thing; she’s always known that the years of intense physical training, the kind demanded of any recruit, has been particularly kind to Clint. But every once in a while, beyond finding herself starkly reminded of the fact that her closest friend in the world is also a fine contribution to the male species of the world, she has these… _moments._ She hates when they arise.

A knock at the door interrupts her thoughts. Natasha walks over and looks through the peephole, only to find a curious pair of state troopers standing on her porch. She pulls back and silently curses. Clint must have left a trail or, more likely, they were just canvasing the area. Schooling her features, Natasha answers the door with a blithe smile. The troopers act friendly enough. One is a man in his mid-fifties, short and stalky in a brown uniform that looks like it was tailored to him when he’d been a slimmer man. The other is a woman half his size, a complete rookie at probably 22 or 23 years of age. It’s the woman that identifies themselves as officers Andrew Wallace and Skylar Haman, and asks to be let in. Natasha can decline, but that’ll raise suspicions. Trusting that Clint is smart enough to stay scarce, she invites them in. The man, Officer Wallace, surveys her cabin from behind dark shades. His partner immediately draws off her sunglasses and Natasha finds herself suddenly thankful that she cleared away any evidence of soiled bandages.

Natasha lends an air of credibility to her modest act when she sets aside the bag of garbage and apologizes about the mess. 

“The chase happened late last night,” Wallace says, taking off his hat. “Around four a.m.”

“Oh god,” Natasha mutters, face drawn into a perfect facsimile of horror. “Was anyone killed?”

“Three of the suspect’s associates,” Haman informs, and Natasha represses the flinch at the thought of fallen recruits. “Two of ours were injured, but non-fatally.”

“Who were they? Gang members?”

“Don’t know that yet,” Wallace tells her. “Can’t really answer anything, miss. This is more where we do the _asking.”_

“Right,” Natasha returns, flustered, nodding like an upstanding citizen would. “Ask away.”

It’s a wash. Natasha plays the entire conversation as expertly as any trained actor she’s ever seen grace the silver screen. She mostly just nods and offers one-word answers, acting like a rattled woman that can’t wrap her head around something as brutal as a deadly car chase. 

“You live by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t ever get afraid out here in the woods by yourself?”

She’d normally laugh at a question like that, but she downplays the answer, responding without a hint of wryness to it, “Not until you showed up at my door talking about some crazy criminal.”

The guy is older, salt-and-pepper already coloring his hair, and Natasha figures him for an old codger, the type of officer who’s been on the job for more years than he’s been alive without it. It’s confirmed when he responds to her anxiety with old-fashioned paternal comfort. “Don’t worry about it, miss. The truth is the guy is probably long gone. We’re just following up with canvasing the area, but we really don’t expect him to stick around. Not with this much heat. I think you’re fine. But if you feel the need to spend some nights closer to the town, there’s some lovely bed-and-breakfasts around the area.”

She smiles. “I’ll think about it.”

“Speaking of a long way back to town,” Haman says, gesturing towards the back, “I think I’ll use the little girl’s room before we leave. Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” Natasha answers. “The bathroom’s down the hall, third door to your left.”

Officer Haman nods and turns, and Natasha knows Clint will hide himself away in her bedroom before anything can be a problem, but her eyes still track Haman intently. 

“What do you do living out here by yourself?” Wallace asks, drawing back her attention.

Natasha shrugs. “It’s my father’s cabin. I’ve been trying to fix it up these last few months so that I can sell it.” She laughs a little, sheepishly. “I think I underestimated the task.”

Wallace glances around, eyes sweeping past the old wooden floors to the small fireplace to the kitchen barely big enough to fit four people in without feeling too snug. It isn’t much, and it does require a lot of fixing up, but whatever lies she mingles in about her cover, she likes the charm and simplicity of the place.

Wallace offers a friendly smile. “It’s lovely. Just out of the way a little.”

“Yeah, I get that response a lot.”

A second later, Haman reemerges from down the hall, a bewildered look on her face as she carries with her Clint’s blood-soaked shirt in her hand. The same ones that must have been thrown out in the bathroom dustbin the prior night. 

“What—” Haman begins, and connects her gaze with Wallace. 

The experienced officer catches on quicker, reaching for his gun – and Natasha reacts, trained and ready as always. She grabs Wallace’s arm as he pulls the gun from his holster. The gun goes off, but the aim is towards the floor and it isn’t much of a struggle before Natasha slams an elbow back into his face and Wallace stumbles back, dropping the gun. She looks up, and Clint already has Haman in a headlock, her sidearm on the wooden floorboards near their feet. 

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Wallace warns them. “Our entire division knows we’re up here. You can’t kill us.”

“Who said anything about killing?” Natasha answers.

“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” Clint offers as a suggestion, containing Haman’s struggle. 

After a beat, Natasha nods. “On your knees, now.”

They resist a bit, but between Clint and Natasha, it takes only seconds before both officers are disarmed completely and on the floor. 

“Listen to me very carefully,” Natasha says to the officers. Clint retreats, quickly looking away to stare out the window. She ignores everything but the two officers, focusing on the sound of her voice, the pitch and timber dropping a bit, a steady thrum of energy starting from her chest and rising to her throat. “We’ve answered all your questions,” she pushes. “We’ve answered them to your satisfaction. You can leave now. You can leave, satisfied.”

The two officers’ eyes go blank, staring vacantly now, trapped with that hard empty look, the look of something as inhuman and unresponsive as a frozen machine. Natasha despises that look, loathes the lack of emotion or intention. The gift of pushing, the feeling of utter control over another human being, supplanting their thoughts and actions with those of her own – others with the gift find it invigorating and addictive. Natasha, raised and conditioned as a young child using the same techniques, has always seen the ability for the gross violation that it is. It’s a necessary evil, though, even if she finds it nauseating. It’s one of the few reactions she has that reminds and comforts Natasha that she’s still human even after years of systematic dehumanization. The Shade made her a weapon, but they hadn’t snatched away her humanity – not entirely, anyway.

“Repeat after me,” she says to the officers. The oldest trick, a trick that hypnotists used to a far lesser degree, is "voice roll," a paced style used to induce a trance. It sounds as if the speaker is talking to the beat of a metronome, emphasizing every word in a monotonous, patterned style. “Natalie Dominic,” she employs her alias, “was questioned. She knows nothing. She isn’t a person of any interest in this case.”

“Natalie Dominic was questioned,” both Haman and Wallace repeat, simultaneously. Their voices adopt that same monotonous tone that all people did when Natasha pushes them. “She knows nothing. She isn’t a person of any interest in this case.”

“Wipe me out of their memory,” Clint reminds her. 

“Natalie Dominic was alone. There was no one with her.”

“Natalie Dominic was alone. There was no one with her,” both officers repeats, obediently.

“We will leave this apartment,” Natasha continues, “and we will never feel the need to follow up with Natalie Dominic again.”

“We will leave this apartment, and we will never feel the need to follow up with Natalie Dominic again.”

Natasha raises a stalling hand. “When I count to three,” Natasha instructs, “you will rise up and resume your normal behavior. You will not remember the last minute of this conversation. As soon as you walk out that door, you will begin to forget this entire conversation until it fades into a distant memory. You will never think it odd. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” both Haman and Wallace answers. 

Natasha nods to Clint, who reholsters their guns, chambers empty, and steps back into the shadows.

“One, two, _three._ ”

Wallace and Haman rise, blink a few times, and the fog clears. “All right, then,” Wallace says, amiably. “That’s it for now. You got anymore questions?” he asks his partner.

Haman shakes her head. “No.” She turns to Natasha. “If you have anymore information, give us a call.” She hands Natasha a business card, which is quickly palmed without a glance. “Have a nice day,” Haman says, pleasantly enough, and then the two officers are out the door. 

There's a long beat of silence, before Natasha trusts her voice to sound even when she says, "We have to leave. Now.”

“I’ll start packing supplies,” Clint returns, already moving.

“Six months," she tells him, half-accusing, "Six months I’ve been here with no problems. You show up for twelve hours and I have to make a run for it.”

Clint grins, unapologetic. “Hey, at least I keep things interesting.”

 

* * *

She always gets a headache after pushing. 

It’s one of the setbacks, but hardly incapacitating. In fact, the older she grows, the less the side effects seem to interfere with her daily life. Nat knows it’s worse for others. Debilitating migraines, full seizures, black outs, and in some extreme cases, coma and death. She’s always had a better handle on the power than most, a tight control over pushing that few others could ever match. She might have been proud of it, but mostly she ignores the details because the only reason she’s so proficient at the skill is because in place of a childhood, she had training. Others with the gift – people like Tony, even Clint to a lesser degree – they developed the ability as an adult. They wanted the training. Natasha’s never had the choice. 

Here’s the thing: most people with the ability to push often never realize their potential, accessing the talent unconsciously only in brief and rare snatches during life. A persuasive individual is often just a persuasive individual, but one out of maybe twenty million have something special, something beyond the norm. More often than not, these people aren’t even aware of the talent they have. It takes both training and ability to hone the skills into something consciously accessible. People see it in plain sight and won’t even recognize it: a particularly successful lawyer pushing a jury towards one verdict, a cop pushing a suspect into a damning confession, a clever businessmen who has a knack for closing profitable deals, or even more commonplace, a philandering man who has more luck with the ladies than he deserves. 

It’s a talent. The Shade forged it into a weapon in the early 1920s. S.H.I.E.L.D. has been trying to put the Jeanie back in the bottle ever since, but what Natasha knows now, has known for some time, is that one way or another, it doesn’t make a difference. All of it, the big bads to the little people, it doesn’t matter. The world ends in 839 days. 

Nothing matters because of that. 

They drive to Clint’s helicopter through dense forestry, but she doesn’t know precisely where they’re headed after that. She knows S.H.I.E.L.D. collectively evacuated their east coast roots and moved their HQ to somewhere in Colorado only a year prior, a decision that pivoted on a growing number of loses against the Shade. S.H.I.E.L.D. used to be the largest, most clandestine agency in the world, a conglomerate of American spies from across every agency and division in law enforcement and military, rallied together under the umbrella of one faction. It was strictly black-on-black ops. But that was back in the heyday when Fury still had both his eyes. The last two decades of internal struggles, backstabbing politics, and warfare against the Shade has left the organization crumbling into a husk of its former glory. These days, S.H.I.E.L.D. is now a metonym for the fallen, a decaying group that just can’t win at anything, but try telling them that. 

Natasha has never been one for lost causes, so it sometimes confounds her how she ever fell in with this lot. She’s neither American nor idealist, nor stupid or suffering from a death wish. She’s been trying to stay out of the feud for years, but even she can see it never really takes much for her to get back into it. This isn’t the first time Clint has shown up and dragged her back into the mess. She should feel resentful, but she owes Clint a debt for saving her life years ago. Not just her life – her _sanity_. A thing like that can’t be repaid, but she keeps trying anyway.

“I was thinking,” Clint says, as her jeep bounces over rough terrain, “about this other world. What do you think you’re like on the other side?”

“Anything’s possible,” Natasha answers, dismissively.

“You a housewife with two kids and a dog?”

“Except that,” she remarks, archly. Then rolls her eyes. “Clint, you know the theory. There’s an infinite number of Earths out there, each altered and slightly different from the last. As much as it pains me to think it, there probably is a Natasha out there whose biggest concern is paying her taxes and getting her kids to school.”

“That really sound so bad to you? Never even dreamed about it?”

She’s never been one for domesticity. “Usually when I'm having that dream, I'm wearing pink taffeta.”

Clint drives them past forested hills giving way to valleys. The day is breaking silver with falling snow, and when she glances out, all she sees is a wintery white landscape that looks freshly painted. She can make an educated guess about where Clint kept the chopper, but she doesn’t bother asking about it. 

“According to the theory,” Clint continues, unwilling to drop the topic, “our bordering reality should be similar to ours. They’ll be differences, yeah. But things should be fairly familiar, too. It’s like we’re neighbors.”

“Clint, when was the last time you had anything in common with any of your neighbors?”

“That’s not the point.”

“What _is_ the point?” Natasha asks, getting frustrated.

Clint tips an eyebrow up. “How can you not be curious about this? It’s another version of Earth, of us.”

“Easy. You don’t think about it because it doesn’t matter.”

His jaw clenches and he looks away, and she can feel the rebuke on the tip of his tongue, can feel the frustration echo back because that’s the line between them. They’re both soldiers and have seen the worst of men, but the difference is Clint could see a wounded animal and still try to save it, while Natasha just sees a rabid animal that needs to be put down. He manages to get under her skin more often than not, drag her back towards S.H.I.E.L.D. even when she wants nothing to do with it, but the one thing he’s never managed to change her mind on is the fundamental rule of her world. _Don’t get emotionally involved._ That way lies madness.

Eventually, they pull up to a basin in the woods where Clint landed the helicopter. It looks like an impossibly tight fit, but somehow Clint had managed it anyway. They disembark the jeep, offload their supplies and tuck it into the back of the chopper, before Natasha straps in to the pilot seat. 

“Head west,” Clint instructs.

 

* * *

They don’t need to stop for refuel, but it's a near thing. 

If Natasha had guessed, given the state and general location, she would have pegged the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker facility as Fury’s new choice for S.H.I.E.L.D.’s headquarters. It’s a Cold War relic for the US, built when Russia was the biggest threat to them. Now, it’s supposedly being used for Aerospace Defense Command and NORAD, but Natasha thinks the fortified bunker is almost perfect for Fury’s paranoid needs. 

Instead, Clint tells her to set down the chopper more than a hundred miles north of the base. 

Afterwards, Clint drives them through winding roads and veers them left at a simple, unmarked fork in the road. It’s more greens and densely populated forestry, and she throws him a curious look. A few minutes later, she can see the outline of something dilapidated in the distance beyond the trees. An old warehouse. Natasha leans forward to get a better look, frowning. Granted, Fury never goes with the expected, so she could allot for why he wouldn’t go big and flashy again; their last HQ had been polished and sophisticated, a beacon to marvel – and it had burned down within a year, when the Shade had found it. But this? The warehouse is small and broken, and Natasha knows she’s missing something. At one of the old facilities, the one she originally went to when Clint had first convinced her to defect to S.H.I.E.L.D., the accommodations had been lackluster too. There had been an entire wall filled with nothing more than a huge map of the world with pins stuck haphazardly all over the place, covered in post-its that were all losing their sticking power; the notes were hastily written in many different languages, and Shade hideouts had been circled over certain locations, half of them, Natasha knew, incorrectly. It hadn’t impressed her remotely, but even that might outdo the current lodgings.

Clint drives on rough dirt and wild grass until they’re almost on top of the structure.

“We’re here,” Clint announces.

He parks, pulls open the door and takes in a breath of fresh air like it’s been months since he’s inhaled something like this, not mere hours. Natasha is willing to play along, slipping out of the car to stand on uneven ground. She takes in a deep drag of air, the clean fresh smell lulling her senses a bit.

Which makes what happens next all the more jarring.

Clint clears his throat and makes a hand signal to a camera affixed to the upper east wall – and a beat later, the broken hobble of a warehouse in front of them disintegrates like a mirage vanishing into the horizon. The area behind them alters too, the paved road winding another way, the trees less dense, more taller, and there’s a gate and a massive facility in front of them that wasn’t there before. 

Natasha realizes she’d been pushed into seeing something that hadn’t been there, and she usually isn’t one easily fooled. It’s a hazard to working in an organization that employs so many talented individuals. Natasha is one of the best at pushing, easily outmaneuvering most recruits, including Clint – but whoever planted the idea of a dilapidated building in her head must’ve been someone she’s never met before. Once she’s felt the touch of another’s mental manipulation, she never forgets it. There’s a signature to each push, a personal touch like fingerprints. The best she’s ever seen, the lightest touch, isn’t even from a member of the S.H.I.E.L.D., but from her childhood in the Shade. The man that trained her – Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier. This demonstration with the warehouse might be on par with her skills, and maybe even better than his.

“Who did the mirage?” she asks Clint.

He smirks at her. “Wait and see. I don’t want to ruin the surprise.”

She looks around and studies the new landscape. It can’t be more than seven months, maybe eight, since she’s been to one of S.H.E.I.L.D.’s modern facilities, and this one is like those in many ways. The more Natasha can shake the aftereffects of the mirage, the more she focuses on the details of her true surroundings. In front of them, there’s extra security: biometric scanner in front, fortified entrances, and security cameras running sweeps of the perimeter in crossections that she can already tell leave a five second window. Several armed guards stand on the other side of the fence, and there’s another jeep and a vintage 1940 Indian motorcycle in the parking lot beyond the gate. From the outside, it looks deceptively utilitarian in nature but Natasha already knows better. Mirage or not to conceal it, it’s still camouflaged well. In low light, the building blends in with the green and dark browns of the surrounding forest, and there’s little landscape buffer between the building and the fence.

“It’s bigger on the inside,” Clint tells her. “Goes down about thirty levels below ground.”

“Stark must love that.”

“He bitched about it the first day, but then he disappeared into a haze of experiments for weeks without taking a break. I don’t think he really cares.”

Natasha nods as they walk to the gates, ID themselves and get cleared through security. Another ten minutes later, they’re riding down the elevator when the doors ping open to the main command level. The room is brimming with activity. Maria Hill stands off to the side, hair long and jet-black, tattoes stemming from her neck down to her arms. Her eyes are focused on the monitor screen in front of her before she looks up. She spots Natasha and Clint and doesn’t even bother with a wave or a nod, just brings her hand up to touch her earbud and says something over the comm.

A moment later, a familiar baritone voice calls out, “Well, hell, Barton. About time you tracked her down.”

She turns on her feet towards Fury – back stiff, falling at attention instinctively. “Sir.”

“Had a nice vacation?” Fury asks, wryly.

She pauses. “Wouldn’t really call it that.”

“Yeah, well I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted, whatever it was.”

“I did, sir, for the record.”

"Now, see, I _almost_ buy that," Fury says. "Like, 85%, 90% of me totally buys that—except the thing is, Romanov, I know you. I know your type. You’re not happy unless you’re doing something productive with your life."

“I thought about writing my memoirs,” Natasha offers, deadpan.

“Don’t get cute with me, Romanov. I’m too much of an asshole to fall for it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, sir.”

 

* * *


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

Maria has a dark tattoo of a serpent that begins at the base of her neck and winds over her collarbone, disappears under her shirt and stretches to the ends of her fingertips. It seems that every time Natasha sees her, with gaps of weeks or months in between, there’s another piece added to the artwork on Maria’s skin. This time, Natasha can see a fresh new sketch of some winged animal, with talons or claws, perched near the tip of the serpent’s head. 

Despite the youthful impressions at first blush, it’s unwise to doubt Maria’s professionalism as Fury’s 21C, and for good reason. Maria is perhaps the textbook definition of diligent and disciplined, but she’s also a capable subordinate that has often butted heads with Fury over the use of her fellow recruits and mentalists when others would fear to tread on those same questionable grounds. Maria has always been fiercely protective of all the recruits, young and old, and some of the recruits have therefor followed in her footsteps over the years when it comes to body art; the serpent represents primeval cosmic forces, sharing the same ambiguity of all ancient elementary symbols like the lion or eagle, except for one singular feature that stands out more than most – its swift, cold-blooded terror. Both toxic and prophylactic, both a good and a bad daemon, both masculine and feminine, it represents duality and opposites. But as Maria had once pointed out, it also stands for the emblem of the brain-stem and spinal chord, consistent with its predominantly reflex psyche. 

For many reasons, it’s come to be the new symbol of recruits. 

Clint’s even got a small tattoo on his shoulder blade, but Natasha is one of the few holdouts because she doesn’t like identifying markers like that. She notes the absence of any visible tattoos on the guards that accompany them towards Stark’s lab, which Natasha can only surmise means they aren’t recruits. Though everyone here is considered unquestionably loyal to S.H.I.E.L.D.’s cause, factions have always been distinct between those with mental powers and those without. Fury may remain as the man in charge, the undisputed leader, but he remains one of the few “ungifted” personnel at the top of the command chain. From Maria, to Clint, to even the handful of leading scientists on the R&D board like Tony Stark and Jane Foster, the upper-echelons are filled with recruits. The lopsided ranks have sometimes inspired resentment among the so-called ordinary members of S.H.I.E.L.D., but Natasha has always felt an outcast even among recruits so she isn’t bothered by the cold shoulder. 

As they’re passing a few doors, Maria points out the new rooms for training personnel, where augmented reality simulations constructed in 3-D environments apparently help non-recruits to train, test out, diagnose and problem solve against recruit’s mental attacks. Natasha eyes one soldier’s advanced-looking headphones, integrated with silver goggles that flash bright colors of red, blue and green across the visors, but she continues on without comment. 

Despite the rustic exterior of the facility, the inside of the S.H.I.E.L.D.’s new HQ is nothing short of pure sophistication, brimming with cutting-edge technology. The walls and monitors even in the corridors are all filled with new virtual display screens, including interactive CGI display. There’s a mark of advanced digital art and performance around every corner, nook and cranny. Especially the main command floor, or what little Natasha had managed to see of it, had new Heliodisplay technology, the type that projects video onto the thin air, and a dozen other advanced tech that she couldn’t even identify. 

She can see Stark’s design written all over every inch of the place. 

“He’s through there,” Maria informs, nodding to the room at the end of the corridor. “I’ll leave you to it.”

Without another word, Maria turns and walks away. The guards leave with her, and Clint and Natasha are left with their feet halted in front of a pair of large, industrial-sized double doors. There’s a single sheet of paper taped to the front of one door, with someone’s sloppy handwriting slashed across, _DO NOT ENTER. SEROUSLY, DO_ ** _NOT_** _ENTER. ENTER AND YOU MIGHT DIE._ Stark, of course. She exchanges a knowing look with Clint, ignores the note and pushes open one door while Clint shoves through the other. They stride in side-by-side to find a laboratory that would look disassembled and destroyed if Natasha didn’t already know better. Tony likes to work in chaos.

She sees Tony’s dark hair first, sticking up in tuffs in every direction. She’s used to seeing him in crisp ten-thousand dollar business suits or, at worst, high-class casual, the type of attire that looks off-the-rack but always comes tailored down to the half-inch. It surprises her to see him dressed in the same simple black t-shirt and dark slacks that all the others here wear. His shirt is dampened with sweat despite the cool air in the room, which tells Natasha she might have caught him after a session of blowtorching something together. He seems transfixed with the HD video projection in front of him, oblivious to his visitors.

“Is Pepper on vacation?” Natasha muses to Clint. “Because he looks worse than normal.”

Tony looks up and over, eyes narrowing when he catches sight of the pair. "Good god, Romanov, you’ve come back to join Hill in judging and glaring stoically at me." Clint snorts, attempting to cover the snicker with his fist, while Tony continues, "I mean, Christ, are you two twins or something?"

“Funny, Stark,” Natasha says, wryly. 

“Hill isn’t around, is she?” Tony asks. “I’ve banned her from this lab.”

Natasha ignores the question. “It’s good to see you too, Tony. What are you working on?”

"That question is silly,” Tony says dismissively. “I’m obviously working on things that require seven-syllable words and more description than I want to give. C’mon, I need food."

He turns and leaves the lab without another word, swift despite limping favorably to his bionic leg, like his good one has cramped up a little. Natasha and Clint have no choice but to follow him, though it’s only the thought that Tony probably hasn’t eaten anything in a while that stops her from protesting the order. The man is infamously _manic_ when working. They walk across the hall, and she eyes Tony’s new bionic leg with some quiet interest. It’s another upgrade, perhaps his tenth since first losing the leg in a bad lab explosion five years back. Most men would lie down for a while after that, but Tony’s never been one to rest. He immediately rebounded by creating a new type of bionic leg, something generations beyond what the medical industry has developed. 

Tony chats the entire way as they go down two levels before arriving in the mess, where he proceeds to cut the line and gather up enough food to feed three times their number. There’s an empty table in the back against the wall. Tony sets down his loaded tray and digs into the food while Clint picks off a few stray fries here and there. Natasha doesn’t have an appetite despite not eating anything since morning, because the conversation around the table is disconcertingly one of half-formed sentences and tangents. As they eat, she notes the other agents are avoiding him as always. What else could you expect of Tony Stark, Destroyer of Worlds, the scientist solely responsible for the crumbling border of two universes? 

“So,” Tony says absentmindedly, clearly ignoring a resentful glare he gets from an airman in the back. “How was Australia?”

Natasha blinks. “Australia?”

“I thought that’s where you were. Among the kangaroos and – what’s that one animal? The marsupial that looks like a rat and a pig fucked and produced a demon child?”

“Tasmanian Devil?” Clint offers.

“Those things aren’t myths?” Tony returns with exaggerated shock.

“I was in Minnesota,” Natasha cuts in, before the two can get mired down in the topic. It’s like watching a Ping-Pong match among six year olds. “It was predictably cold and predictably boring. Just what the doctor ordered.”

“Minnesota?” Tony repeats, in an offended tone. “You really gave up on life, didn’t you?”

Charming and eccentric billionaire, he can fool others but Natasha knows him better. Tony’s aware of the scrutiny he’s getting, and he’s flustered by it, but he’ll never let it show. Natasha is reminded of the real reason he usually takes his food in his lab. It’s hard to blame the personnel for the feeling, but Natasha musters up her coldest look and directs it at the people surrounding them, and suddenly the trio finds the room scarce of any unwanted attention entirely. Beside her, there’s a growing satisfied smirk on Clint’s lips. 

They’d been assigned Tony’s detail early on, back when the palladium experiment five years ago had first gone wrong. She’d seen Tony’s descent into a self-destructive spiral up close, which is perhaps why she’s so forgiving of him when others are not. Once you’ve seen a man at his lowest, it’s hard to feel much hatred, not when pity clogs up the system so well. Pity and, despite herself, friendship. Tony is a hard man not to like once you get to know him.

The story has never been released to the public because that would require disclosing the upcoming global expiration date in three years, but the unsanctioned version is well known among S.H.I.E.L.D. members. The truth, in plain terms, is that years ago, some uncontrolled experiment run by Tony had gone to hell in a hand basket. 

The pictures taken of the rich playboy around the end of the old millenia had shown him to be a man with a slim, athletic build and handsome features, carefree and debonair. He’d been a weapons expert for the military, and a poster boy for _Forbes_ when he was still young enough for acne. Now, more than a decade and a half later, he’s still as handsome as ever, but the ever-present carefree aura is considerably dampened. It’s the look in his eyes that seems to have changed the most. When he smiles, it’s rough around the edges. Not for the first time, Natasha notices the dusky bruising under the eyes, the faint tinge of blue that means far too little sleep and far too much stress. He hasn’t shaved in days; he never does when Pepper's out of town. 

It had been arrogance, pure and simple. One man’s overconfidence in his own mathematical prowess, and the naïve belief in a sustainable renewable, zero-point clean energy. 

Natasha has an IQ that makes most average scientists weep, but even she can’t follow the particulars of Tony’s palladium experiment. She understands the basics, though. Everything, every atom, every subatomic particle in the universe is in constant motion, producing a phenomena called the quantum vacuum flux. Even in the cold, dark absolute vacuum of empty space, there exists this energy; it represents the opportunity for an inexhaustible resource of free and unlimited power. Theoretically, it could change the way the world works. It would have been Tony Stark’s lasting legacy, one that would have rivaled and usurped even his father’s grand gifts to the scientific community and the world at large. 

If only it hadn’t ended in catastrophe.

Now, where Stark Industries once stood as the leading American military’s defense contractor, there lies just one hobbled man with a crumbling reputation. Tony Stark vanished from the public’s eye and now, here, day after day he slaves away in claustrophobic labs among S.H.I.E.L.D men and women, majority of whom hate him. 

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

Natasha looks up, drawn out of her thoughts by Tony’s surprised and slightly accusing voice. She glances over and finds herself staring at a vaguely familiar man – strong jawline, handsome features, well-built body with a defined physique that puts every other agent in the facility to shame. To contrast his stature, he wears a bright blue t-shirt and a guileless look on his face, having stopped cold in the middle of the cafeteria with a tray full of food at Tony’s words. He’s familiar, from _somewhere_ , but it takes a full second for the recognition to hit.

“Jesus Christ,” she eventually mutters, floored. “You’re the Captain.”

Steve Rogers of the US Air Force, otherwise known as Captain America, flashes a timid smile, egregiously attractive for a man that should be nearly seventy years dead. 

“Hi,” he offers, lamely, waving.

“Cap,” Clint answers, grinning. “Thanks for the meet and greet out front. Your mirage was damn impressive.”

Natasha’s eyes widen as she grasps the connection; _he_ was the one who managed the mirage that fooled her when she and Clint first approached the HQ? His mental abilities are legend, even today, but Natasha feels herself unsteady because of the revelation. 

Tony rolls his eyes. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he says to Natasha. “Tell me you’re not a fangirl of his. I’ll kill myself. I’ll just, seriously, kill myself if you are. It’s like grown men and women collectively wet themselves whenever he walks into a room.”

She doesn’t miss the resentment and genuine smolder behind the words, which isn’t entirely an unfamiliar tone on Tony; he often finds bureaucrats and certain military boys to be tiresome and annoying, but it’s all Natasha can manage to recover from her shock. She schools her features into a neutral expression – or at least tries to, because it’s not everyday, even in her line of work, to get such a blast from the past. 

“How—” she begins faintly, then shuts her mouth. 

Clint leans over, grinning. “He was on ice. Now he isn’t.”

Natasha nods, confused, because like any of that explains _anything_. “You were dead,” she remarks, as if she’s informing the man of a condition he might not have been aware of.

“Yeah,” Steve returns, scrubbing a hand across the back of his neck. “That’s a long story, actually.”

“He was frozen like Sleeping Beauty,” Tony snaps in irritation. “Now he’s awake. There. I’ve made it shorter.”

Steve, who had been standing relatively benignly thus far, red-faced in embarrassment because apparently, despite being _Captain America_ , he isn’t one to be comfortable with being dragged into the center of attention like this, finally turns a glare towards Tony.

“You really want to watch your tone, son.”

Tony’s eyes flash. “Yeah? I’m thinking my tone isn’t your biggest problem with me.”

“Okay,” Natasha says lightly, cutting in. “Someone start from the beginning. I want to hear the full story.”

* * *

 

Turns out, she only really needs to hear the last chapter.

Everyone in the world knows Captain America’s story, but Natasha is privy to the details that even others with classified clearance don’t know. She was raised and trained by the Shade, but one man in particular – Bucky Barnes. Bucky had a unique perspective on Captain America because he’d known the legend when Steve had just been some gawky kid from the Bronx. They’d been best friends growing up, all through their adolescence until the war, when Bucky had enlisted and Steve had found himself recruited another way. 

The story fractures at that point, depending on who tells the tale. Some say it was Howard Stark that created him; others disparagingly say it was German mad scientist, Dr. Abraham Erskine. Some say he was born that way, and others now call Steve a myth formed from baseless America-propaganda hype, nothing more. History is riddled with fact and falsehoods mixed together. The truth has always been somewhere in between. Captain America was the first recruit, a man both born and made. He always had the mental ability to push, but it had taken a super-soldier serum injection and gamma radiation to allow him to tap into his full potential. The experiment had been a resounding success beyond anyone’s imagination, augmenting not only his mental powers but his physical ones too.

Since then, the Shade and S.H.I.E.L.D. have both tried to duplicate Dr. Erskine’s famous first experiment, but the formula was lost after the scientist’s assassination. Natasha is a product of several generations of follow-up experimental serums, but Steve Rogers remains a singular success. When Bucky had talked about him, it was always with a deep admiration and affection, even when speaking of the gangly boy Steve had once been, a boy who never knew when to back down from a fight he couldn’t win. 

But by all accounts, Steve Rogers died seventies years ago in the waters near the Artic.

When she learns of his miraculous recovery from the icy waters, Natasha schools her features into a neutral mask. Given the number of other impossible things Natasha encounters at a frequent basis in her life, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but she thinks about Bucky. For better or worse, she was raised by the Shade, but Bucky had always been the one safe-harbor for her even amidst the cruelest parts of her training. He was a man that never aged, perpetually twenty-something looking thanks to injections not dissimilar to the one Erkskine had developed. However, a past trauma and a defect in the serum left him with one missing arm and an unstable ability to push. As a result, his mental psyche fractured. At times kind and sweet, then vengeful and cold. His tumultuous nature is a perfect example of why she left the Shade, because the organization manipulated and bent Bucky to their needs. 

Still do, in fact. 

She doesn’t mention any of this to Steve, the time and place and recent introductions inappropriate for such a conversation, but the burden of this secret—and her own frustration as to how to handle it—seems no lighter a few hours later as she retires to her private quarters.

She finds Clint there, to her surprise. “You all right?” he immediately asks.

She pretends not to know what he’s talking about. Tossing her bag onto the bed, she proceeds to unpack her things while Clint plays with polishing his arrows on the floor like he doesn’t have his own room across the hall to do this in. Neither says a word for nearly half-an-hour, the silence comfortable and familiar as they both navigate around the small space with ease. Finally, Natasha looks over and sighs. She settles into the corner, back sliding down the wall until she’s seated shoulder-to-shoulder with Clint. 

His eyes betray nothing, but she’s seen him look at her with a thousand different emotions, from anger to amusement to affection to something precariously close to love, if she still believed in the emotion. A man like Clint is deceptively complex; he’s loyal to a fault, but he’ll test the boundaries of that loyalty by pushing as far as he can go when he meets with something objectionable. He forces Natasha to confront things about the world, about herself, that she’s never thought about, but that’s only because he’s forever challenging his own beliefs, and it’s like testing them against hers is the only measure of comparison he can find acceptable. Clint never stops thinking, even through wisecracks and hell and blood and guts. It’s one of the many things they share in common.

“I’m fine,” she finally answers his question. “Just…” she stalls on the words _emotionally compromised_ , because she isn’t there yet, but seeing the Captain has thrown her, reminding Natasha of a world she tries every day to forget. “I’m fine,” she repeats softly, instead.

She can tell Clint doesn’t buy it, but he nods anyway. “Gets some rest, ‘Tasha. I don’t know what Fury has planned, but my bet is we’ve got a busy day tomorrow.” 

He presses a kiss to her forehead, and she lets him, then he rises and leaves the room without another word.

* * *

_There’s fire all around her._

_Bucky’s face is twisted, the worst parts of his fractured mind peaking through, and he’s taunting her about the fact that she’ll never change, that she’ll always be like him. There’s a shattered, broken doll from her childhood, the one her mother gave to her on her sixth birthday. Natasha watches it burn. The world is ash and flames, and she stands in her S.H.I.E.L.D. uniform in the center, unable to do anything._ Sacrifice _, the word comes. A recruit knows the price of everything, and nothing can be saved without sacrifice._

_“What would you do to save the world?” Clint asks. And he burns._

Natasha wakes with a start. Sweat-soaked and gasping, it takes a second to reorient herself with the environment. The details of the nightmare are already slipping through her fingers like sand through an hourglass, but the grip of fear holds strong even as the images fade. Even now, her childhood fears have a stranglehold on her and she remembers the fire, the one that claimed her parents’ lives. She runs a hand shakily though her hair, attempting to calm herself, but her breath is erratic and so is her heartbeat. She squeezes her eyes shut against the welling tears. The digital clock on the nightstand tells her it hasn’t been more than a few hours since she’s fallen asleep, but god, the nightmare seemed never-ending. She tells herself it’s just a nightmare; it’s over; it’s nothing.

It’s _everything_. 

The world ends in 838 days and counting down, and she bets it’ll burn just like her childhood home had.

She decides to get ready well before dawn. To compensate for the time, she decides to alter her appearance, a necessity every time she starts over. Her time in Minnesota is hardly on par with her undercover missions over the years, but she goes through the habitual routine like it’s a second skin. Her hair is long and dyed-red, and she’s had it that way for nearly two years now. It’s time for a change, and she has always been able to alter her looks like a chameleon. Her sharp, attractive features can be framed around any color – black, blonde, red – and she decides to go with a dark shade of dirty blonde this time. The process requires her to strip the red off, then bleach it, then re-dye it the tone she wants. By the time she’s done the process from beginning to end, people are already lining up long in the mess hall for breakfast. 

The agents do a double-take as she walks around. Natasha eats breakfast alone and then proceeds to the gym, eager for at least an hour of exercise to work out a few tense muscles. Her time spent in Minnesota had been one of luxury, of respite – and even though she always keeps in shape, Natasha is suddenly reminded of the stark difference between fit and combat-ready. She walks into the gym, a fully-equipped room filled with every work-out machine one could possibly think of, and stops short at the entrance.

Steve Rogers is pounding away at a punching bag like he’s beating in the face of evil itself. After a few one-two punches have gone on in an endless stream, the bag unhinges and goes flying across the room. It hits the wall and lands in a broken heap. Steve barely blinks an eye, resigned as he walks across and hooks up a new bag of sand to beat. 

“Rough morning?” she asks, curiously.

Steve looks over, surprised. “Rough century,” he answers her, after a beat.

She pauses. It can’t be fun waking up on the wrong side of the millennia. She’s had to restructure her entire life more times than she can count, ditching one life for the next because of brainwashing, because of the job, her country, or changing allegiances. It’s made her wary about attachments, but she understands more than most what it means to uproot your entire life and one day wake up to a new one. 

“You’re a recruit, right?” Steve asks, delivering a hard jab to the punching bag. 

“Yeah.”

“I hear one of the best,” Steve goes on to say.

“I’ve been doing it longer than most.”

“Modest,” Steve notes.

“Says Captain America, the original boy scout.”

Steve gives a mirthless laugh, taking out his pent up aggression on the bag so that it sways back and forth forcefully. Natasha circles around and anchors the bag for him, and Steve nods his thanks before resuming a quick right-jab-left-hook combination. Natasha studies his biceps, briefly distracted by the sweaty display of them even through the white tee he has on. The guy has no noticeable flaws as far as she can see, and she silently wonders about the veracity of all those stories Bucky used to tell her about him being hopeless around women. Natasha highly doubts it’d take much for Captain Hotpants (as Tony called him yesterday) to get a girl.

The thing about guys as big as Steve, they’re usually slow. She suspects Captain America won’t follow the same stereotypes, so she shifts her weight on her left foot and decides to see a few of his moves. She feels the force of his punches land on the bag, studies his swiftness. Natasha was raised as a weapon, so it’s easy to break down a person’s strength and weaknesses if you know what to look for. Steve favors his right side a bit too much. For some, it’s a fatal flaw that she can easily exploit, but Steve has speed in him too. 

“I like the hair,” he remarks.

“What?”

He gestures vaguely to her lighter locks, a bit sheepish. “The hair. Not that red wasn’t working for you, but – uh, it’s nice. This color.”

She wonders, briefly, if he’s hitting on her. Decides after a brief moment when he goes back to punching with a singular focus that it’s most likely just him being polite. She’s good at telling when a man’s interested or not.

“You know I know a lot about you,” she ventures.

“Don’t tell me you’re a fan.” Steve makes a face. “Or worse, like Tony.”

She gives him a sympathetic sort of wince. She spent the majority of the evening yesterday watching Tony and Steve trade potshots at each other, but Tony was by far the more vicious. Despite the clear antagonism, she can’t get a fix on why they dislike each other so much. Maybe Steve hates Tony for the same reason that everyone else does? But, already, she feels like that’s a poor theory to formulate. And whatever criticism you can say of Tony, he usually doesn’t react to people’s animosity in kind, not unless they’ve done something particular to piss him off.

Or maybe it’s just two boys with giant egos that can’t fit into the same room?

“Don’t let Tony’s act fool you,” she returns, carefully choosing her words. “He grew up idolizing you. Came with the territory of being Howard Stark’s son.”

Steve falters on his next punch at the mention of one of his former friends. He looks away briefly, schooling his features into neutral again, but Natasha sees enough. She’s more certain of her decision not to talk about Bucky more than ever; it’ll likely make Steve feel worse, not better. The Shade is a degradation of everything the two men stood for when they were young men in the military. It’s bad enough that Steve has to deal with the fallout of everyone he knew being dead; it’s going to sting like a bitch when he realizes his oldest friend in the world is working for the other side.

Assuming, that is, he doesn’t already know. 

The intercom suddenly comes on. “Alert one!” Maria’s voice blares over the facility. “Recommend alert one! Man battle stations, incoming enemy attack! This is not a test. Repeat, this is not a test. Everyone report to your stations!” 

“What—” Steve begins, before a large explosion goes off somewhere nearby.

Natasha is thrown to the side, crashing into Steve, and everything goes black.

* * *


	3. Chapter 3

_Bright lights. A glimpse of a hand moving toward her. Someone calling her name. Pain._

Natasha comes back in quick, jarring flashes of consciousness. 

When she finally manages to pry her eyes open, the scene around her is one of chaos. The gym has a crater the size of a car in it, leading to a decimated hallway. Beside her, Steve groans as he recovers from the floor, pushing off on arms and elbows. They lock gazes on each other as Maria’s voice blares over the speakers demanding damage assessment. The words filter in through her haze. This many levels below the surface, it can only mean one thing. It isn’t an aerial attack. They’ve been infiltrated. 

Steve gets to his feet first. “You all right?” Steve asks worriedly, as he helps Natasha up. 

She shakes off the dizziness. “Been better, though I think someone should probably get the number of that car that ran me over.”

“Huh,” Steve says. “Black Widow cracks a bad joke. Should I take that as a sign of a concussion?”

She rolls her eyes. “That, or I’ve been hanging out with Barton too much again.”

Steve doesn’t look that injured, but Natasha has to take a quick steadying breath to keep from passing out. A quick glance-over shows that she has minor abrasions on her body and her hands puckered red and angry, but it’s the small head wound at the back where she made collision with the wall that’s the most distressing. Steve’s dig might be right. Concussion, possibly. 

Steve doesn’t look convinced when she waves off his concern again, but she doesn’t stop to reassure him, instead taking the lead out of the room. They pick their way across a pile of rubble four feet high where a wall used to be, and at first Steve tries to assist her but she warms him off. “I’m not what you need to be worried about right now,” she reminds him, just as Maria’s voice comes on the intercom again, reminding everyone to double-time it to the main level. Steve nods, tightly, then slips past her towards the staircase exit and it’s all she can do to keep pace with him as they bound down the stairs to sublevel nine, the main command level. 

Her head swims, but Natasha grips the banisters and forces herself to keep moving. It’s like being pulled through (slow and then fast) into murky water, because her head feels light and a normal person would pass out, slow down, maybe even faint. But to her, the injury is something to be assessed and countered, a cold hard math that recalculates around the impaired movement and cognition. She suspects that there’s something perhaps inhuman about that, about not reacting with self-preservation the way that normal people do, but she’s surrounded by men and women who all do the same thing; in front of her, she doesn’t think Steve would slow down if he were set on fire.

When they arrive at the command room, the place is breathing pandemonium. Half the room is figuratively held together by balls of string and wire because the ceiling has caved in, and the lights and circuitry from above all spark at random intervals just to keep things lively. Her assessment dampens when she spots a few staffers’ bodies lying strewn across the floor. Some of them dead. Steve stops to help one of the technicians to their feet, but Natasha paces across the room to Maria. The other woman has an ugly gash over her left eye, but she’s clearly focused on barking out orders left and right like a born drill sergeant. 

“What’s the situation?” Natasha asks her.

At the same time the side door slides open, and Fury, Clint, and Tony come striding through. “What the fuck?” Tony asks, more astutely.

“Shade,” Maria informs, locking a new clip into her gun. “At least three full assault teams are coming down the levels as we speak. Sublevel five, seven and eight have suffered explosions. We need to coordinate logistics, rescue and defense.”

Fury’s trying to access damage control from several surveillance monitors, but power is down. He pivots to the room at large, and calls out with a booming voice, “Ladies and Gentlemen, if you’re not dying, then you’re still on the job. Regroup, find your stations, and don’t fuck up. Remember, they’re Shade, so keep your eyes peeled and focused on the corners. To those new among us, remember the four key mental assaults. Pushing, shielding, mirages, and infiltration. If something looks fishy to you, question your reality. Now get to work and—” 

“Wait—what’s infiltration?” some woman hollers from the back. Everybody turns and stares at some loud-mouth brunette, and most would falter under the awkward moment of finding themselves trapped under everyone’s scrutiny, but the woman just rolls her eyes. “Look, no offense. I didn’t mean to interrupt your rousing St. Crispin Day speech or anything, it’s just—this is my second day here. A lot of people here are rookies, and we can’t tell pushing and infiltration from a bad sex joke. We need a little more 411, y’know?”

Natasha doesn’t know much about the personnel, but the question serves as a clear highlight of how understaffed and inexperienced S.H.I.E.L.D. must be, lately. 

Fury turns towards Clint and Natasha next and says, “Take her and any able-body soldiers you can find, and neutralize the assault teams.” The command to instruct her is implicit, and Natasha bites back her annoyance because the last thing she needs to be is saddled with babysitting duties, but Fury is already turning towards Steve. “Coordinate search and rescue.” He turns to Tony. “Get my security and power-grid up and running.”

“Oh, c’mon,” Tony protests. “All this ability in my head and you’re using me as an IT guy?”

“Too full of yourself to follow orders?” Steve remarks snidely. 

“Listen, let’s face it,” Tony throws back, smiling with a bite at Steve. “If I only had a little humility, I'd be _perfect,_ but I’m flawlessly self-aware enough to realize how that sentence came off.” He turns back to Fury. “I can help with more than just the power.”

“Maybe,” Fury says, having none of it. “And yet, the power remains your top priority. Now since death is a very gloomy affair, and it’ll require me to do a shitload of paperwork, my advice to everyone here is to stay alive. Get to work!”

No one (except Tony) needs to be told twice.

* * *

The newbie’s name is Darcy Lewis, some twenty-something non-recruit that came out of New Mexico. A clear rookie fresh to the ranks, she can barely handle the weight of the AK-47 in her hands as she struggles to keep pace with Natasha, Clint and the six other crewmembers she cherry-picked from the batch of slightly-less-wounded-than-fatal. She doesn’t even have to trade any looks with Clint to convey any message of annoyance, because he automatically takes it upon himself to be the instructor.

“There’s four basic mental assaults,” Clint informs, as they stride down the halls. “Pushing, shielding, mirages, and infiltration. Pushing is the ability to force a person to do whatever you want. It’s the hardest, and so your average Shade member won’t be using it on you because it’s like asking a guy used to paint-by-numbers to duplicate a Rembrandt.”

“The average Shade agent is dumb as a brick?” Darcy asks. “Man, that’s actually a little reassuring.”

“Don’t be too reassured,” Natasha cautions, wryly. “Even the village idiot can do some of the other stuff.”

“Shielding is easiest,” Clint confirms. “It’s just the ability to create a force field or a protective barrier around themselves, or more offensively, use it to shove people back. It can be thrown like a— a fireball, or something. Mirages are illusions. And infiltration is invasion of your mind and memories, but that requires concentration and a calm environment, so it’s probably not going to be used during an assault.”

Darcy frowns. “I don’t know which thing is more trippy.”

“Pushing is the worst,” Natasha answers, immediately. “The others may physically hurt more, but there’s nothing like having your free-will taken away. Nothing.”

Clint remains silent, but she catches the brief concerned look that flitters across his face. None of them have come through the last dozen years or so without invisible battle scars and figurative bullet-wounds to their psyche. Natasha has seen entire personalities wiped clean and rewritten because of extreme cases of pushing. Clint had almost been a permanent head-case like that once, but that’s little in comparison to her own history. To Natasha’s knowledge, she’s had her personality and gaps of memory – months and even years long – wiped clean at least _twice._  

It isn’t something she likes to think about.

“So,” Darcy says, hurriedly. “How do we fight the mental assaults?”

Clint is quiet for a beat, struggling to come up with an answer. Natasha used to tease him about his never-ending reserve of patience, a talent derived from those sniper skills that allow him to wait out a single mark for as long as three whole days, but answering the rookie’s questions won’t be a matter of patience this time. Clint knows just as well as Natasha does, the rookie _can’t_ fight back. Countering pushing, or even any of the other mental assaults, requires training. It can’t be told. It has to be taught through rigorous field training or even through some of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s fancy V.R. training rooms. It’s obvious Darcy never even got through orientation. She’s as easy a target as a lamb waiting for slaughter.

“Look for the corners,” Clint eventually volunteers. “In a mirage, the hallucinations will always bend awkwardly around the light at the edges. You see that, you know you can’t trust what’s in front of your eyes. Trust your other senses.”

“My other senses?” Darcy repeats, incredulous. “What am I supposed to do? Lick and smell my way out of an hallucination?”

“Just stick with us,” Clint says. “We’ll take care of you.”

This _officially_ became a babysitting-the-rookies deal.

The group weaves their way down another corridor before Clint asks Natasha, completely out of the blue, “When in the hell did you have time to dye your hair?” 

He sounds genuinely bewildered.

“Not the time, Clint.”

“No, but seriously, _when?_ ” he continues, incredulous. 

“A quarter of the HQ is on fire,” she replies, with a roll of her eyes. “You really think the middle of chaos is the best time to be discussing my hair?”

“When _aren’t_ you guys in the middle of chaos?” Darcy butts in, muttering under her breath. “Even I’ve heard some stories.”

Natasha pauses, because the rookie has a point. “I was thinking about cutting it, too,” she tells Clint, lightly.

Clint grins. “It’s nice like this. Take some getting used to, but it looks sorta like that time we were in Moscow.”

“I thought we agreed never to bring up Moscow?”

“No, you’re thinking of Budapest.”

Natasha pauses, realizing he’s right, while Darcy asks, “What happened in Budapest?”

The question is cut off when one of Clint’s arrows passes by so close to Natasha’ face that she can feel the air disrupt around it. The tip burrows into the center of a Shade operative coming down the hall, one Natasha hadn’t even seen yet, and all hell breaks loose. There’s six or seven men, and a pair of Shade members advance while Natasha exchanges fire with them. She ducks into the recessed pocket of the hallway, and Clint is on the other side loosing arrows from his bow two at a time. Darcy has her back pressed into the wall beside Clint, looking as pale and green more than any of the other rookies, but Natasha doesn’t have time to worry about her. 

Natasha runs out of ammo in her Berretta and reaches for another magazine clip, and Clint quickly moves on to his advanced arrows. 

He bolts one to the east wall and fire sparks like bright firecrackers before a small controlled explosion punches through the corridor. Natasha uses the cover of smoke to advance, taking out three Shades consecutively with her firearm before a fourth manages to knock her gun away. Natasha slams a heeled boot into the man’s stomach while he tries to use some type of cattle prod on her. She grabs his arm, twists at the wrist and then hurls the rod back towards him. She thrusts a flat-heel palm up against his nose and he goes down with a geyser of blood. She rolls over, popping back up on her feet near the shadows again, and she can make out another dozen Shades coming up the hallway. 

“Heads up,” she calls out to Clint.

But then the world shifts on its axis. The edges of her vision bleed and blur, and even before the mirage takes full effect, Natasha recognizes the touch of another mentalist. The Shade operative proves talented, throwing Natasha into an illusion of a formless room filled with nothing but smoke. There’s no walls, no people, no objects. A panicked person might start shooting in random directions. Instead, Natasha looks around. There’s hazy beams of light and shadow and the thick stench of burnt flesh. There’s distant screaming, a false echo. _Begu, moy rebyonok. Begu kak mozhno buistreye!_ A concentrated bitter taste forms in the back of her throat, of old memories and trauma, but the trick is weakening because Natasha can already see the tell in the corners.

There’s smoky light everywhere, but at the edges of her periphery there’s thin beams of color crisscrossing and a soft ambient glow. Natasha mentally drives through the mirage, closing her eyes and then _pushing_ through. She finds it’s harder to do with her head injury.

“Natasha!” she hears Clint’s voice, distantly.

She focuses on the direction of his voice, closing her eyes again and willing her mind to break the mirage. The next second stretches, like a rubber band strained as far as it can go without snapping in half, and when she opens her eyes again, reality crashes back. Sound, sight, smell, touch – it all comes back in a single deafening moment of hyperawareness. 

A bullet grazes the side of her cheek, slicing open her skin with razor fine accuracy, but it’s just a scratch. A masked Shade operative darts across at her, a quick blur, and Natasha twists away. Another bullet goes off, but the aim is towards the wall and Natasha delivers a roundhouse kick that knocks his weapon down. She catches a jab to the face that makes her cheek go numb. She throws a punch but her opponent catches her fist with fingers spread wide. 

The smoke clears enough for Natasha to make out the features of her attacker, and she stops, suddenly. “Bucky?”

The man returns, “Natasha.”

Time slows down for another reason entirely, nothing to do with mental attacks, and Natasha stares at her former mentor – both her oldest friend and her oldest enemy. The mask covers only a strip of his face, framing his light eyes, and his familiar suit has been upgraded like hers to a new bulletproof material. He’s still achingly familiar, the same age as he was when she’d last seen him.

She barely has time to recover before Darcy fires off a shot at Bucky, and only misses because he deflects the bullet away with a quick manifestation of shielding. Natasha sees another Shade member deliver a loud, solid kick to the back of Clint's head; he smashes into the nearest wall and it’s _that_ visual that snaps Natasha out of her paralysis. She jabs an undercut at Bucky’s side and twists out of his reach. Bucky stabs her with a blade he produces swiftly from his belt, and a slice cuts open at her arm. She manages to duck his next attack, turn, and kick out, using the full force of her adrenaline and emotion to drive him into a wall. 

The fight goes up a notch. Natasha was trained by Bucky, but she doesn’t know all his moves and neither does he know all hers. They dive apart, and then attack again, a quick series of hard jabs and swift kicks. They go hurling through a door and crash into the next room. Natasha recovers first, stretching across for Bucky’s blade lying across the floor, and she swings out. Bucky ducks, then kicks closed the door behind him with a heeled boot, granting them the illusion of privacy.

It’s been years since she’s seen him, nearly a decade, and the last time he’d parted with her by nearly gutting her with a serrated blade eight inches deep. Whatever camaraderie once stood between them is now thwarted by a pillar of treason that she erected when she picked S.H.I.E.L.D. over the Shade, and she can feel his retrained anger behind the power of his attacks. Bucky has always been one of the most dangerous men she’s ever known, but doubly so when emotions evoke his fights.

“Long time, Natasha,” he remarks. “You’re looking good.”

“You look the same,” she counters.

She isn’t as young as she looks, but she isn’t gifted with quite the same slow aging benefits as Bucky and Steve. But she’s aged and grown up significantly quite a bit since last seeing him, and none of it, she figures, is reflected in the way she looks.

“It’s a nice surprise to see you,” Bucky offers.

“But you knew I’d be here,” Natasha returns, knowing better.

“It was a possibility I entertained. An added benefit.”

“Bucky—” 

“Don’t call me that!” he snarls, the switch from calm to furious always a flash with him. “You lost the right to call me that nine years ago.”

She doesn’t respond for a beat. They face each other like they're closed brackets to one another, mirrors or complimentary images, because as much as he trained her, she had as much of an impact on him. The only things have that ever made Natasha falter in her allegiances toward the S.H.I.E.L.D. have been two fold. First, a strained apathy in the shadows of the upcoming apocalypse, and second, the possibility of this moment right here, confronting the only man that had ever protected her during her childhood. The world in which they're friends no longer exists, but for all her gifts at compartmentalizing, it's impossible for Natasha to disassociate herself from that life entirely. 

And he realizes it too, maybe even shares in the conflict, because neither of them are the type to pause for a chat, friendly or otherwise, in the middle of a fight.

She decides to use that to her advantage. “It doesn’t have to be like this, Bucky.”

“Save it. This only ends one way and you know it.” He pauses, looking back at the closed door. “Was that Barton out there? The man who turned you?”

For many, _many_ reasons, she doesn’t want Bucky focusing on Clint at all. She decides to throw a wrench into his confidences instead with misdirection. “Steve is here.”

That gets a reaction out of him, if only in the fact that he goes still as a statue. The moment stretches, and Natasha catalogues his response: genuine surprise and doubt. Which means he isn’t here for Steve, either. The number of reasons for Bucky showing up in a Shade raid are limited. He wouldn’t come out for anything less than a grand prize, and as much as the Shade puts a priority on taking out S.H.I.E.L.D. facilities, Bucky is a man apart from that. He’s an assassin, like her. His jobs are more narrow and finite. He’s the type of operative you send after one man in the middle of an army, not after an army itself. It’s like using a Porsche as a tank, otherwise.

“You’re lying,” Bucky accuses.

“Am I?” Natasha returns, lightly.

“What move are you trying to make?”

“No move. I’m bored of manipulation. I tend not to weep over spilled blood, but you and I have both done enough evil in this world to span a lifetime. Several, in your case. I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to end that way between us. I was once your friend and I betrayed you. Steve has always been your friend. I wonder if you’ll betray him in the same manner?”

The tense moment shatters when Clint comes barging through the door, bow drawn, arrow nocked and released, and she can count on one hand the number of times Clint has ever missed a target but Bucky dives, quick to throw up a mental shield. He vanishes behind it, invisible to the naked eye, but it’s a cheap parlor trick that won’t last long against two recruits like Natasha and Clint, so she knows he’s using the seconds to retreat. It’s what she would do.

A moment later, she reaches out with her senses and tests the surroundings, confirming her suspicions when she finds nothing. The room is stilted and void of any mental disturbances. She’d sense it otherwise.

Clint approaches her. “You all right?”

“Bucky didn’t know I was going to be here. He didn’t know about Steve, either. Who is he after, then?”

“Tasha,” he repeats, stubbornly. “Are you all right?”

She turns to face him. “Listen to me, Clint. You don’t send a man like that into a raid. He’s after someone. Not me, not Steve. Fury, then?” No, she realizes. Fury is the man in charge but the most valuable asset they have on base is another man. One that could change the tide of war not with mental powers, but with his mind no less. “Tony,” she declares, straightening. “He’s the most valuable asset on base.”

God, she’ll never let Tony hear that. His ego might explode.

She starts moving for the door, finding seven dead Shade agents and five dead S.H.I.E.L.D. members in the hallway. Darcy is huddled in the corner, shell-shocked. She has her gun clutched tightly in her hands, pale-faced and eyes-wide. 

She looks to Natasha, dazed. “I’ve never been near a dead body before.” 

Natasha represses a flinch, and when she says, “It won’t be your last,” she means it more as counsel than a warning. She urges Darcy to stand by grabbing her by the arm, but she’s nominally gentler than she normally is as they march down the hall; Natasha can’t even remember the first dead body she saw. She supposes it must have been her parents in the fire, but she’d never actually _seen_ the remains. But death is death, and the first always marks a person. S.H.I.E.L.D. shouldn’t be a place where rookies become experienced in that sort of thing, but obviously the organization is desperate. Another part of Natasha wonders why this woman would ever volunteer for a position like this if Darcy is obviously as green as she looks. 

“Uh,” Darcy says, numbly. “Where are we going?” 

Clint follows up in the rear, bow and arrow drawn to cover their six. “You met Tony Stark yet?”

“I’ve barely met the janitor,” Darcy throws back.

“Well, then,” Natasha offers. “I guess it’s your lucky day.”

Darcy swallows, still pale. “Yeah. It’s feeling like it.”

* * *

She ignores the rookie’s shock as they make their way back towards Tony on the third sublevel. They find him in the midst of gutted circuitry and three fallen bodies. Shade operatives. It almost surprises Natasha, but not really. Although not the greatest at hand-to-hand combat, Tony has never been a slouch. He took the disadvantage of a missing limb and turned it bionic, with more bells and whistles than most sports cars, and she’s seen him kick through walls with that leg. Besides, his ability to push has never been that laughable either. 

“We have to get you out of here,” she announces.

Tony looks up, annoyed. “Kinda in the middle of something, guys. Or maybe you didn’t notice we’re still without power in—”

“They’re after you,” Natasha cuts in. “This entire ambush is designed to get you.”

“What?” he asks, distractedly. 

“You’re too exposed here. We’re not making you an easy target.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Tony disputes stubbornly. “Not with you, not with them. Listen, this is a shit detail, but Fury gave it to me and hell if I’m going to fail at a shit detail. I have work to do.” 

“If I have to make you come with me,” Natasha warns, sharply. “I will.”

Tony looks up, challenging. “I’d like to see you try.”

Natasha moves forward but Clint quickly steps in between them. “Guys,” Clint says, calmly. “Think about it, Tony. Whose work here threatens their organization the most? Your experiments have always been of major interest to a lot of people. The longer you stay here, the more—”

“You’re distracting me,” Tony cuts in. “If you’d two don’t stop hounding me like some mentally deficient sub-humans in an infomercial, I will never get this system up and running. When I do, you can let your girlfriend have her wicked way with me. But until then, shut the fuck up!”

“I swear to god, Tony,” Natasha begins, but fights off her frustration with curling fists. 

In the end, she subsides, planting herself at one corner of the hallway on the lookout. Tony continues on with his re-wiring while Clint stands over him and observes. She keeps busy by checking her injuries, tying off a bloody cut on her forearm with a strip of cloth. 

Eventually, Clint leaves Darcy standing watch over Tony and joins Natasha at the end of the hall. “Are you sure he’s after Tony? I know the man’s reputation—”

“I know the _man_ ,” Natasha interrupts. “This is Bucky’s play.”

Clint stays quiet for only a few moments. “You never talk about him.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Tasha, this is _me_. Don’t give me that stoic bullshit answer. What happened? He give you the betrayal speech? You counter by using Steve as a way to throw him off his game?” 

This is why she should never fight with Clint: because they know too much about each other, because even when she doesn’t tell him things, he still _sees_. 

“I don’t want anything he said eating at you,” he goes on to say. “You’re better than him.”

She looks away, shaking her head, before she offers, “You know, in Russian culture there’s this old silly superstition. Bread should only be cut with a knife, not with your hands. Otherwise it is said that your life will be broken. I used to break bread with a knife until I was eight, until Bucky stopped me. He said we were already broken, and nothing was ever going to fix that.” She turns back to Clint, holding his gaze steady. “I’m not the sentimental type and neither is Bucky. Maybe you’re right. Maybe sometimes a person can be redeemed, but Bucky and I are both people that know the true purpose of a knife. It damn-sure isn’t to cut bread.” 

“You’re not the same as him,” Clint presses.

“Don’t be a fool, Clint. I’m _exactly_ the same as him, except he holds his allegiances to the Shade and I to—” she pauses, then settles on the safe answer, the one that doesn’t outright tag him by name, “S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“There’s a reason you switched sides.”

She doesn’t answer. There are a lot of reasons she switched sides, but she doubts any of them are as respectable as what Clint assumes. The Shade may have gained a visible stranglehold on power for nearly a century now, but the truth is, their uprising has been orchestrated since the early 1700’s and is probably unstoppable now, like a juggernaut that keeps picking up speed. How do you stop that? The highest among the Shade ranks is a small group simply called the Trust, a conglomerate of rich, powerful people across the world, all anonymous. They give the directives, and men and woman specially trained like Bucky blindly follow them. Even after being a member for nearly two decades, Natasha can’t tell you the ultimate purpose of The Shade because they don’t have a unifying dogma. Fury and some others refuse to accept that, misguided under the notion that every organization as large and as powerful as the Shade runs under some centralized theme. The Nazis believed in a master race. The Romans promoted a republic. Both ideologies spread through bloodshed. 

But the Shade have no creed, no philosophy, no central ideology that they sermonize. Because they aren’t some crazy political group, or religious group, or even a militarized gang of warlords. They’re about greed, plain and simple. The Trust wants what all powerful men want: more power.

But regimes fall every day. Natasha tends not to weep over that; she’s Russian, after all.

“Look, Clint, we’ll talk about this later. Right now, we need to stay focused.”

Clint eventually nods, and for that she’s thankful. Unfortunately, Tony’s two-minute estimation turns out to be a wash, but the generators eventually start churning. Emergency lights recede as the hallway floods with florescent lighting, and she can hear power coming back on throughout the floor. 

“All right,” she says, turning to Tony. “Ready to move?”

“I’m all yours, Romanov,” Tony returns, then looks to Darcy, as if noticing her for the first time. There’s a thick streak of blood on her face, though it’s not hers. “Who’s she?” Tony asks, bewildered.

“I tried introducing myself,” Darcy says, “but he zoned me out. Which is actually a little impressive because not a lot of people can do that.”

“Introductions later,” Natasha says, already thinking of their six next moves. They can’t radio in and inform Fury of the developments because communications might be compromised, which means they’re going to have to do this like a ghost. “Pack up. We need to move aboveground.”

“Leave the facility?” Tony questions.

“Rule number one of not getting dead,” Clint says, right there with her. “Don’t be at a place where people are trying to kill you.”

“That’s a good rule,” Darcy pipes up. “I like that rule.”

* * *


End file.
